Chapel Hill, North Carolina project Horseback is the primary creative vehicle of multi-instrumentalist Jenks Miller, who has released more than a dozen recordings since 2007 fusing drone metal, black metal, American roots music, and psychedelic noise into a consistently singular body of work. The Invisible Mountain (2009) and Half Blood (2012) are among the more widely recognized releases in a catalog that has appeared on Relapse, Hydra Head, and Three Lobed Records. Miller's willingness to draw equally from Neil Young's Crazy Horse and the work of Sunn O))) makes Horseback a difficult project to categorize but an easy one to recognize.

Kansas City, Missouri post-metal project Idle Heirs was formed in 2024 by Coalesce vocalist Sean Ingram and producer Josh Barber, representing a significant stylistic departure from Ingram's history in aggressive metalcore. Their debut album Life Is Violence was released on Relapse Records in April 2025, drawing on atmospheric sludge metal and shoegaze-influenced post-metal textures that prioritize space and layering over direct sonic aggression. The project marks a new creative direction for Ingram outside the confines of the band that defined his career.